Todd Monken was out on the street after the Baltimore Ravens fired his boss, John Harbaugh, after the 2025 season. Few had concerns that the veteran offensive coordinator would be unemployed for very long. He would either find a head coaching position or follow Harbaugh to this new job with the New York Giants.
Monken decided to take the head coaching gig with the Cleveland Browns, a job so lowly regarded that many viable candidates asked not to be considered.
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The Giants and Harbaugh were suddenly left in a bit of a lurch. They filled their offensive coordinator position with Matt Nagy, added NFL veteran assistant Greg Roman to handle the run game, and hired former Tennessee Titans head coach Brian Callahan to handle the passing game.
In his first interview as a head coach at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis this week, Monken was asked what makes Harbaugh such a good coach.
“How much time do we have? He’s elite in a lot of areas. I’ve said this many times, he’s got a gift for confronting anything that gets in the way of winning football without being confrontational. He just does. It’s unique,” Monken said. “He doesn’t let it linger. He’ll come right down the hall and say, ‘This isn’t good enough. What can we do to change it? Where are we at?’
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“And the other thing is the offseason’s no joke. John, it’s football every day, man. It is how are we going to get better? Every year I was with the Ravens, it was offense 2.0, offense 3.0. What are we going to do to improve, take advantage of our players’ skillset? So he’s nonstop. He’s about winning football.”
A reporter said that Harbaugh “made it clear” that when he came to the Giants, he wanted him to be his offensive coordinator before the Cleveland opportunity opened up. He was asked if he was thinking about the Giants and working with Jaxson Dart.
“Of course, I mean of course. I mean, I was hopeful that I would get the Cleveland Browns head coaching job. That’d be silly to say that I wasn’t hopeful of that, but I was excited to go to New York with coach,” he said.
That’s all water under the bridge now. It’s difficult to turn down a head coaching job in the NFL, even if it is one that not even some of the game’s most talented coaches have been able to succeed at.
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This article originally appeared on Giants Wire: Todd Monken explains what makes Giants’ John Harbaugh an ‘elite’ coach
